Question about time-sink type content!

[Nexor]

I mean 10th ring and to some extend 8th shawl had everything.

Faction grinding / Tradeskill / Killing lots of mobs / getting somewhat rare drops/ and a kinda like event for Raiders ( but back than it was everyone in zone helped had up to 120 ppl trying to help)

[Zolzimar]

10th ring was definately a neat quest. Besides the fun factor of it, the final war was a great way to give newer players a way to be a part of a raid atmosphere, and give forming/recruiting raiding guilds a decent spot to see folks play that dont usually raid. We have a good enough community to take advantage of an idea like this on THF I think. You would definately need to keep the rewards from being better than any post 70(meaning.. just after you hit 70 with no kael/icewell+ armor). Im not the idea king, but in general, the 10th ring was a decent community building event.

[Killeverything]

I had start doing this on my server when I was playing around with setting one up. what I did is have a exploring quest where you need to go to lot of different zones and try to get thing from small quests. the level 1-5 had them going from Qyenos to freeport to east commons to everfrost, and in each zone they had to talk to a Npc and then kill some kind of mobs to get a item for a turn in.
the Idea was to get them to know the different zone and how to complete quest. I think it would get ppl into the other zone. that is one of the things I miss in EqEmu, there is no real reason to go to most of the older zones. You could just add more zones to get for the higher levels.
You could also update the shawl quest for the ppl that really enjoy to tradeskill in the game. I know on live I speat a great deal of time getting the shawl quest done

[Thenrin]

10th Ring and 8th Shawl! Just Do It! <please?>

[Zolzimar]

And I have to say, even though I really havnt done alott of the solo aura quest.. Its a great example that you are hearing our plea for some fun, indepth, dynamic events. Looking foreward to see how the rest of year 2 of THF shapes up.

[Jaxer]

I personally like Factioned armor quests, from Velious, different armor with virtually the same stats but completely different looks.

That way you dont effect balance but allow players to show off what they have earned.

I remember seeing players in Kael armor and thinking about what they had to do to earn that.

[Catamander]

I am pretty new to THF but played live for a decade, did all the timesinks on live (velious faction swaps, vt key, ldon grinds, shawl quest, etc.).

The two things that, at least for me, sets apart the "good" timesinks from the "bad" timesinks are 1. variety and 2. story.

Any "timesink" should not involve repeating the same zones over and over and over and over. This was the fundamental flaw with LDoN (and the later DoN) token mission systems. About the twentieth time I've run the same map I want to find the dev and do very bad things. Likewise sitting in Kael grinding the same mobs over and over for scores of hours to get faction up for velious armor, or the forty hours I spent in LGuk for the FBSS and SSoY when they were the hot items for tanks. Even mass slaughtering a zone for very rare drops off the trash can get pretty old pretty fast (hello, Dreadspire augment camps).

This is quite different from how the velious ring and shawl quests, the DoDH spell missions, the epics, or many of the other great quests worked. I loved those because there was variety to the timesink -- do 1 then 2 then 3 ... then step 90! A little bit of the sit-and-grind or rare drop camping (and the tradeskilling was the worst of it), but a decent story and enough variety that you weren't doing the same thing for 100 hours the get the reward. Plus, progressive rewards along the way kept you going (ring1, 2, 3, etc., a variety of drops along the way).

Likewise, the DoDH spell missions rocked because they were progressive (iirc 5 missions per spell, each mission different and progressive, with different strategies required, for 5 spells, one per level, for a total of 25 different missions). The drops in them were good enough that folks would run them a few times without being hounded or begged, most took about an hour, maybe 2, for a regular group, and could even be boxed if well geared and decently skilled (my wife and I each 3-boxed and cleared all of them). The maps were decently interesting and mechanics of them generally cool or at least a bit different.

Vex Thal key falls a bit in the middle. The only real pita about that was a couple of really ugly contested very-rare camps (Maidens Eye?). Sitting on your butt 20 minutes to wait for one spawn spot of 3 mobs that can rarely spawn the shard dropper, who rarely drops the shard = not fun at all. Clearing the FG bugs down to the royals and destroying everything in that area for more reasonably rare drops = more fun.

Finally, I really like the idea of using the instancing system for some of these and something like monster missions or instanced missions like dodh might make some of the mechanics of "prestige" more workable, though I don't have any idea what the instancing code or support is like on the server. Shrouds might be another mechanic that would make the prestige mission more viable -- the nice thing about shrouds is you can swap back and forth with ease without having to bank gear, etc. Level a shroud to 70 would be a way to work it, though I likewise have no idea what kind of support THF has for shrouds.

Ok, thats my lunch break. Back to work for me. Thanks to all the THF crew for the fantastic gaming experience we have been having thus far!

[Walksoft]

just my opinion but i like the idea of evolving items, and i actually enjoyed the EZ server prestige ring quest...something similar to a ring quest which gradually increases in difficulty (at first maybe a fresh 70 can do a few ranks, all the way up to end game raid content required for further progression) would be very rewarding to anyone who pursued it, and would give a big push toward progression.

[Jeido]

Catamander for president! He should be the time sink dev.